There is little doubt about how people can contribute to good oral health and hygiene through their own behaviour. In essence this concerns brushing teeth twice a day for at least two minutes with a fluoride containing toothpaste. Still this elementary behaviour is not as widely and fully practised as dentists and health organisations would like it to be. Behaviour change and interventions to evoke change are essential to achieve this.
The ability to monitor various aspects of consumers' existing tooth brushing behaviour is key to developing effective intervention strategies and evoking behaviour change.
Self-report and observation have been widely used in medical, psychological and market research to understand behaviour. Both methods have disadvantages. For example, people are very often unable to report key aspects of their behaviour, or may be influenced by what they think the researcher would like to hear. When an individual is being observed, the presence of an observer is likely to affect the very behaviour they are there to observe.
In order to capture tooth brushing behaviour of individuals without having to revert to self-report or observation, a toothbrush has been developed with a compartment in the handle which contains a small programmable data logger based on a 3-axial accelerometer, including memory and battery (International Dental Journal (2008); 58: 307-320). Because it is hidden within the toothbrush, people quickly forget that it is there and therefore revert to naturalistic behaviour. While in the toothbrush the logger will check the acceleration on each of the x, y and z axes, and will initiate recording when it detects acceleration above a pre-set threshold. It will then record acceleration data in three axes at a pre-specified frequency creating a record of pre-determined length. At the end of the record the logger will stop recording unless it is still experiencing above threshold acceleration, in which case, it will create another record. For each record the logger will store the data for subsequent downloading and analysis.
Analysis of the stored data is often a complex procedure, because any motion with sufficient acceleration to trigger the logger will trigger data capture. This may or may not be the motion of interest, and with each false event captured, device power and memory capacity are reduced. Also, a further data analysis step is required to filter the desired events and remove any false events.
The present inventors have found that this problem can be solved by using a sound sensor in combination with a motion sensor such as the accelerometer based logger described above. Combining information from the sound sensor enables reduced recording of false events, leading to reduced energy consumption, lower power and memory requirements, greater device efficiency and greater ease of data analysis. This is especially advantageous in consumer behaviour analysis settings, where data capture may be required over prolonged periods of time. Also, small low power devices are less likely to interfere with normal consumer activity, so the data collected is more representative of real behaviour.
US2008/0102953 describes a toothbrush for encouraging children to brush on a regular basis, which may include a motion sensor and may also include an audio processor communicatively linked to an input audio transducer (e.g. microphone). The sensor data is processed to generate gaming signals that are communicated to a gaming device as gaming inputs. There is no description of any functional interaction between the sound and motion sensors in this device, nor any suggestion of reduced recording of false events or reduced energy consumption.